Home gateway devices, such as cable subscriber set top boxes (STBs), may include a general purpose host processor, and/or other associated hardware components, for both processing AV traffic, such as audio streams, video streams, etc., and for processing non-AV traffic. For example, the host processor may receive AV traffic, decrypt the AV traffic and/or add encryption to the AV traffic, and forward the AV traffic to a computing device operably connected to the gateway device, for example, via a local area network. In addition to performing these actions, the host processor may also process non-AV traffic that is transmitted over the local area network. Accordingly the host processor may negotiate multiple incoming and outgoing network connections, including determining whether traffic transmitted via each network connection should be encrypted or decrypted, encrypting and/or decrypting AV traffic, switching and/or responding to non-AV traffic, and tearing down each network connection when the network connection has been terminated. Furthermore, the host processor may process the traffic uniformly, for example, in the same manner, irrespective of whether the traffic is AV traffic or non-AV traffic.